I’m pretty sure a sign of getting older—or at least that I’m getting older—is the inability to be crazy passionate about the current crop of music, to be whipped into a fervor about certain acts, the kind of reactionary defensiveness that leads to lengthy screeds and the bolstering of diminished expectations. Take, for example, Vampire Weekend, or Taylor Swift, or Lady Gaga. Discussing this at a party on Saturday (in the kitchen, with a beer, where all slapdash theories are best concocted), I concluded these bands or acts are to me as the mosquito tone, the high frequency alarm which at a certain setting is only audible to people under 25 years of age or so. The point being: your piercing sonics do not agitate me, I’m becoming culturally deaf.
